Amr Awadallah has seen multiple waves of hype in tech and helped build real companies through it. He co founded Cloudera, took it public, watched it get acquired for 5.3 billion dollars, and is now building Vectara, a platform that helps enterprises ship AI apps that are accurate, safe and actually usable in production.
In this episode, Amr joins Alchemist Accelerator founder and CEO Ravi Belani to unpack a striking finding from an MIT report. An estimated 95 percent of enterprise AI projects are failing.
They dig into why that is happening and what to do differently:
The real reasons enterprise AI fails in production
Why “go do AI” from the board is not a strategy
How fake exploration budgets create fake success stories
The 3 whys every founder and buyer should test
Why do anything
Why now
Why this vendor
How to tell a real business need from AI theater
Why passion for the problem, not the tech, drives grit
How cofounders, early hires and investors make or break your company
What Vectara is building as an “operating system” for AI agents
Why context, security, accuracy and cost control matter more than demos
Amr also shares raw, founder level advice. From firing fast in the first 50 hires, to choosing investors who have actually been in the trenches, to his simple test for whether you really love the problem you are working on.
If you care about building AI products that survive past the pilot stage, this conversation is a must listen.